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I argue that empirical studies into the phenomenon of religious conversion suffer from conceptual unclarity owing to an absence of philosophical contributions. I examine the relationship between definition and empirical result in the social sciences, and I show that a wide divergence in conceptual approach threatens to undermine the possibility of useful comparative study. I stake out a distinctive role for philosophical treatments of studies into religious conversion. I conclude with the suggestion that use of the terms 'convert' and 'conversion' may not in fact be conducive to clarity in the present context, and that subsequent studies may improve their precision through replacing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although most evaluators are not sociologists, Sociology is represented in the evaluation profession. To what extent does the presence of sociologists affect the content and emphases of evaluation projects? Reflecting on four projects on which I have served as an evaluator, I conclude that a background in Sociology has been important in the sense that it has led to an emphasis on structural arrangements that may provide a basis for a program's lasting impact. However, it is apparent that an evaluator's disciplinary background is only one of several influences on the content of an evaluation project. Stakeholder mandates and standard evaluation practices also have important influences on how an evaluation is conducted. The impact of discipline-based content on the thinking and decisions of program administrators will vary according to the willingness of evaluation researchers to maintain regular communications, to insure that the rationale for discipline-based content is understood, and to present results in terms that can be understood by people outside one's discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a brief account of the author's career beginning with his student days in the Department of Sociology, University of Chicago and the School of Public Health, University of Michigan. The following evaluation projects are summarized: the impact of an interstate highway on the Detroit Orthodox Jewish Community funded by the Michigan Department of Transportation; Healthy University Health Promotion Project funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation; Drug Use and Alcohol Abuse Prevention Demonstration funded by the DHHS Center for Substance Abuse; utilization of the Ryan White Care Act (HIV-AIDS) funded by DHHS Heath Resources and Services Administration; and National Environmental Health Action Plans in Europe funded by the World Health Organization/Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A value judgment says what is good or bad, and value-free social science simply means social science free of value judgments. Yet many sociologists regard value-free social science as undesirable or impossible and readily make value judgments in the name of sociology. Often they display confusion about such matters as the meaning of value-free social science, value judgments internal and external to social science, value judgments as a subject of social science, the relevance of objectivity for value-free social science, and the difference between the human significance of social science and value-free social science. But why so many sociologists are so value-involved - and generally so unscientific - is sociologically understandable: The closest and most distant subjects attract the least scientific ideas. And during the past century sociologists have become increasingly close to their human subject. The debate about value-free social science is also part of an epistemological counterrevolution of humanists (including many sociologists) against the more scientific social scientists who invaded and threatened to expropriate the human subject during the past century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the occasion of the re-publication of Erving Goffman's Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, including the remarkable appendix, 'Insanity of Place,' the authors propose new ways of reading Goffman's work in order to highlight his attention to havoc and containment. Goffman's 'Insanity of Place,' explores the phenomenon of mental illness by asserting that it is an instance of havoc, a symbolic and practical condition that disrupts the social order of life, and one that must be contained. By situating this essay at the center of Goffman's oeuvre they examine Goffman's 'philosophy of containment,' and trace its trajectory from Asylums, Stigma and 'The Insanity of Place' to its full crystallization in Frame Analysis. The authors offer a generative reading of havoc and containment in order to understand the incoherence, irrationality, unreason, incomprehensibility and unbearableness of social life and the imperative to preserve social order from collapsing, dissolving or imploding. This reading enables us to see the cracks in the social order and understand containment as the constant effort exerted to recuperate transgressions and deviations back into that order. Goffman's analysis becomes an opening into engagements with the work of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault around the notion of the normative order and the issues of containment and transgression. Thinking through Goffman's philosophy of containment as the framework for an analysis of socialization, normalization, and social ordering affords an approach to thinking macro-micro linkages of order and instability that confront both our contemporary society and the discipline of sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author explores our value relation to religious pluralism, defined both as a characteristic of contemporary societies and as a phenomenon of particular historical significance in contemporary social science. She sketches pitfalls threatening researchers when their values intermingle with the object of their investigation. Starting with a fictional dialogue between sociologists on the identification of religious motives, the author briefly goes back to the study of motives within the sociology of Max Weber. Because the jurist is an important actor in contemporary debates on religious pluralism, the author continues with a short dialogue between sociologists and jurists. These two types of observers discuss the objectives, the affinities and the tensions related to their respective tasks and, thus, the limits of their respective disciplines. But Weber himself has something to add… [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical sequence of core New Zealand sociology texts is presented through brief descriptions of their content and form, together with some comments on other sociology-related texts and New Zealand-produced sociology texts that have wider distributions. Texts are progressively larger and with a more extensive range of coverage and move from being compilations of previously published work to original material. As the pedagogic form and content of the texts thickens, there is a consequent tendency for the texts to be distanced from ongoing sociological research in New Zealand and there is less attention to the key features of New Zealand society as the framework for organizing the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology has been plagued by a series of dualisms and dichotomies that seriously diminish its relevance. There is the opposition of theoretical and empirical sociology. There is the question of the link between reality and thought accordingly. The extent to which thought and discourses can properly reproduce reality, or the claims about the autonomy. The aim of this article is to question the need for artificial dichotomies, and to offer a solution to the Gordian knot by proposing an approach that would capture social reality exactly in the middle, instead of breaking it into two halves and then trying desperately to put them together.

This article presents a theoretical reconceptualization of escalation behavior as an instance of persistence, or the basic tendency to bring goal-directed behaviors to completion. Most past efforts to explain escalation (e.g., self-justification theory and prospect theory) have tended to underscore the sequela of sunk costs and emphasize issues of emotional or cognitive bias. Lewinian and Atkinsonian theories of motivation, as well as contemporary theories, are employed as the basis for an alternative, persistence paradigm, emphasizing the continuity of inertial elements central to all forms of human motivation. This paradigm is used to derive key theoretical constructs such as proximal closure, clarity of completion, goal valence, or intrinsic interests active in escalation. Particular attention is drawn to the empirical viability of the paradigm, its utility in integrating past research and theory, and its potential contribution in framing new research and generating practical means of intervention or control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the necessity of materiality for social order, or the performative and integrative capacity of things to help make the society. This means that there is a need to investigate what happens in social settings which constantly problematize materiality and are uncertain as to what exactly count as things. This discussion will draw on an on-line ethnography, extended over 18 months, of people exchanging sexually explicit material and communications over Internet Relay Chat. They set in motion a considerable range of mechanisms of materialization, and they did so in order to establish a sense of ongoing ethical sociality, a social order.

Rising to a classical challenge in theorizing the materiality of the social world, this article revisits the venerable conundrum of social thingness in order to argue for a radically performativist view of the ontological facticity of social relations, patterns, and institutions. Its aim is to make-believe that social orderings are maintained by self-fulfilling prophecies which are stabilized by the reality effect of what the author calls an everyday essentialism. The stickiness of the social, in other words, can in part be explained by a circular bootstrapping operation which is often misrecognized as such in order to produce an effect of autonomous facticity and ontological transcendence: the Münchhausen effect.

In correcting Rickert. Weber was influenced by Dilthey when he accepted the central place of interpretive understanding in the Geisteswissenschaften. But it was partly the influence of Husserl that led Weber to correct Dilthey's psychological reductionism in two respects, both of which are important in Weber's concept of ideal types: (I) categorial understanding, such as we have not only in mathematical analysis but also in the analysis of rational action, does not depend on psychological peculiarities, and (2) perceptual understanding, such as the investigator may have of irrational and nonrational action, is not given by immediate intuition alone but is partly constructed, and the validity of the construction must be tested by causal analysis. The author argues, farther, that there is a phenomenological aspect to Weber's well-known types of authority, for example. (Editor) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on sociologist Talcott Parsons' theories in social science. From the outset Parsons has stressed that action is oriented toward that which is uncertain, unknown, and not automatically controllable. The most enduring and widely applied of Parsons's efforts to specify the sources of contingency of action is his scheme of functional system-problems--adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latent pattern-maintenance and tension-management. Derived simply from the notions that goal-directed action can be analytically regarded as instrumental or consummatory and that action occurs within both an external and an internal environment, the AGIL formulation, including its attendant notions of hierarchy of control and inverse hierarchy of conditions, has been employed to depict the structural organization along that continuum of nature which spans the whole range of living systems from biological to cultural levels. At various phases of development of action theory, Parsons has turned to the analysis of typical processes that transpire within a given structural framework-processes such as socialization, deviance and social control, phase movements, and the like.

The article presents a biography of Ilse Schutz, widow of sociologist Alfred Schutz, who died in New York on June 7, 1990. Ilse is survived by her brother Eric, her children Evelyn and George, and her granddaughter Claudia. Ilse was an elegant Austrian lady. Ilse was so modest that one can doubt she was seriously aware of her own accomplishments, which are conspicuous in even the briefest review of life. The routine worlds in Vienna, Austria and New York were typical for a woman of Ilse's society, class, and era. Ilse's husband died in the year 1959, after an almost two-year illness during which Schutz could no more than outline a final full statement of his philosophical position. She also played an important role in publication of Alfred Schutz's literature. Immediately, Ilse set out to master the financial situation, which was conducted thereafter quite well. Soon Ilse arranged for a second edition of "Der sinnhafte Aufbau" in Vienna, where it had been unavailable since arrival of Nazis. Negotiations with a vanity publisher had been begun by Schutz for a volume of reprinted essays and it was agreed with Schutz to edit it, but Ilse decided upon someone else as the publisher instead and that was only a beginning. There was a great deal more to be brought out in the world of publishing and editing by Ilse Schutz.

The article addresses itself to the question as to whether a Homo is properly to be considered as a political animal, or whether Homo is best understood as merely a form of social animal which has evolved particularly complex survival stratagems. The published work of the contemporary Swiss zoologist, Adolf Portmann is discussed, and arguments for the view that there are solid grounds for distinguishing between social and political animals, and that Homo inhabits the realm of the political animal are made. According to the author, the process by which mature humans make newborn humans social animals is both distinct from and prior to the process by which mature humans make human social animals into human political animals, although there can be no political animal if there is no social animal to be molded into such. He thus argues that the politically mature human adult is a development out of the socialized infant who has learned to walk and talk at about 9 or 10 months of age because walking upright and speaking the mother tongue, the biological determinates of Homosexuals, have been made available to the otherwise helpless infant by the efforts of adult human caretakers.

The article discusses the series of reflections "Against Epistemology: A Metacritique," written by Theodore W. Adorno, in which he employs sociologist E. Husserl's work as a model in his anticipation of the movement announcing the end of epistemology. Adorno is correct in pointing to the paradoxical character of Husserl's conception of philosophy. The reification of logic and philosophy takes place because it is an abstraction from the very facticity whose essential structures it is meant to clarify and thereby effectively separates the content of science from its essential structures. Moreover, Adorno has, as a result of his reflections, raised a serious question, about the doctrine of essences. According to the author, the givenness and acceptance of the world as social and thus shareable does not make the world public and meaningful because one believes or accepts it as so, rather the belief and acceptance of the "We" allows one to find the world already meaningful and social.

The article compare the philosophy of sociology in relation to nature, biography and history. Sociologist Max Weber was the first to grasp that social facts are not things, that they are unitary realities, both very real and ambiguous. They are mixed realities in flux, more actions in progress than congealed and completed facts, in which contradictory, standardized and unique, quantitative and qualitative aspects are manifested as mixed together and confused. Weber states that sociology is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences. The object of understanding sociology is an action endowed with a subjectively referred meaning. This action is none other than the action of individual persons. Social science is distinguished from natural science in that its subject matter is not nature but society, not the objective but the subjective, not the mechanically standnrdizable but the nonrepeatable, not an immobile, fixed structure but the behavioral variable, action, not the unrelated but the related and the relationship.

The article analyses the meaning of sociology. The meaning of sociology is dissatisfaction with the status quo, with the hope of its radical transformation. The destiny of reason is thus central to sociological research, it is its basic concern. Once tradition goes into crisis as a source of formal, basic legitimacy, sociologists start to look for the bases of the new morality. The primal misunderstanding of sociology is to be found in the postulate that rationality coincides with preciseness, the mathematizing raison of the Enlightenment. The whole methodological, basic effort of postsystemic sociology, was to try to get away from that misunderstanding. It is true in the first place for Max Weber. He was linked to the great tradition of German historicism, and central to the Methodenstreit, which painfully seeks a mediation between nature and history, an existential, biographical experience, unique and unrepeatable, and a scientific law, an explanatory causal or conditional scheme, capable of explaining phenomena and predicting their development by means of their relatively uniform aspects.

This article focuses on the sociological philosophy. The author suggests that sociological theories provide some powerful arguments within the core of philosophy itself. There are possibilities not only for sociological philosophy and for philosophy of sociology, but also for sociology of philosophy. The last is not a form of philosophy at all, but is simply another area of empirical sociology. Sociology has much to say on a number of issues, such as the mind/body relation, and on the ontological questions of realism and anti-realism, materialism and idealism. Having been invoked at first in epistemology, sociology now seems to point even deeper into philosophy's core, into metaphysics. To conclude, sociology should prove to be relevant to a host of issues within the traditional purview of philosophy. Sociology has implications right across the board in philosophy, even in its stronghold of metaphysics: space and time, existence and non-existence, the ideal and the immediacy of lived experience are all parts of our current sociological controversies.

This article discusses on the issue of departing from the usual beliefs or established doctrines in the field of social science. Social science must break with the preconstructions of common sense. One of the major obstacles to progress in the social sciences no doubt resides in the formidable gap between strict compliance with the rules of proper scientific conduct, as they are defined by the methodological ways taught in universities, and true scientific virtues. Studies that simply confirm the constructions of common sense and ordinary discourse by franscribing everyday assumptions into scientific definitions have every chance of being approved by the scholarly community, and its audiences, especially if they comply strictly with the more superficial rules of scientific discipline. Whereas research that breaks with the false obviousness and the apparent neutrality of the constructions of common sense, including scholarly common sense, is always in danger of appearing to be the result of an act of arbitrary imposition, if not of ideological bias, and of being denounced as deliberately producing the data fit to validate them.

This article provides a comparative analysis of two disciplines, economics and sociology. This analysis is based on methodological and metatheoretical differences between the two disciplines. Economics has a more unified core model and approach than sociology. The marginalist revolution allowed economics to redefine itself on a much more streamlined basis. Microeconomics became the paradigm for the discipline as a whole. Thus, contemporary economics exemplifies a highly abstract, deductive approach to social science. Its style is characterized by the development of models based on deliberately, vigorously and rigidly simplified assumptions. Sociology on the other hand tends to value description or explanation over prediction. That is, the realism of the concepts and propositions used, their resemblance to the perceptions and meanings of the participants, is highly valued. Indeed, sociology often takes these very assumptions as problematic. Sociology's very lack of definition, its broad substantive claims, its theoretical cacophony, its strong empirical bent, its perennial identity crisis can be viewed as selective advantages. Economics, which is continuously being narrowed and refined theoretically, while making exaggerated claims empirically, is a specialist style of adaptation; sociology is ever the generalist.